Such shows, he said, were “an ugly trend” that he hoped would end soon.

Yet if anyone can help stop the trend, perhaps it is Mr. Berlusconi himself. His Mediaset company, Italy’s largest private broadcaster, showed “The Sopranos” to great success on one of its pay channels, while its Canale 5, a free channel, has shown “The Boss of Bosses,” a 2007 miniseries about the Sicilian Mafia boss Salvatore (Totò) Riina, and “The Last Godfather,” a 2008 program about the Sicilian boss Bernardo Provenzano.

In baroque Italy, where image and reality are so intertwined that the term hypocrisy seems inadequate, many did not even blink. “Those are the typical things you say when you go in an area with high Mafia density,” said Gianluca Nicoletti, a radio commentator. Besides, he added, “I don’t think he said it with great conviction.”

In his 2006 best seller “Gomorrah,” on the Camorra, or the Neapolitan Mafia, Roberto Saviano recounts how some real members of the Mafia model their style on that of fictional mobsters.

Mr. Berlusconi made his remarks at a news conference in the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria, where his cabinet unveiled an ambitious 10-point plan for fighting organized crime. They chose the site to demonstrate the presence of the state in Calabria after the ’Ndrangheta, or Calabrian mafia, threatened bomb attacks in recent weeks against magistrates and the president of Italy.

This month, immigrant day laborers living in squalid conditions clashed with residents in Rosarno, a Calabrian town in the grip of the Mafia. Analysts are still debating whether organized crime groups set off the riots to force the immigrants to flee, or whether they helped quash the riots.

In his remarks, Mr. Berlusconi, whose coalition is dominated by the Northern League party, known for its harsh anti-immigrant stance, also praised Italy’s accomplishments in cracking down on illegal immigration.

“A reduction in the number of foreigners in Italy means fewer people to fill the ranks of organized crime,” he said.

Programming aside, the Berlusconi government has a conflicted record on organized crime. On Thursday, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said the authorities had confiscated goods worth more than $9.78 billion from organized crime syndicates since 2008. The authorities have also made dozens of high-profile arrests in recent months, including the arrest in Spain last week of a boss in the Camorra.

But critics say other government measures have undermined those gains. Prosecutors vehemently oppose a bill proposed by Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition that would significantly limit the scope of wiretapping, a technique prosecutors say is essential to investigating organized crime groups. Other critics argue that a measure passed last year that taxes repatriated assets at only 5 percent is a boon for money launderers.

On Thursday, Italy’s leading industrialists’ organization, Confindustria, said that businesses that failed to report extortion by organized crime groups would risk expulsion.

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